"Madame Web" is a superhero movie. Even worse, it's a Marvel superhero movie: part of an enormous franchise of similar movies. It's a little bit different than most of the superhero movies. The superheroes are all women, for one thing, which is unusual enough. But it makes a more significant effort to have a little bit more depth than most simplistic superhero movies. Yes, it has fights scenes. (Of course it has fight scenes. How can you have a superhero movie without fight scenes to prove that the hero is a hero, and also super? That's kind of required.) But it does have some odd depths to it. I'm not going to say that it's a classic. I'm not even going to say that it's a classic of the superhero genre. But it's different.
One of the differences is is a kind of a mantra that gets repeated, as mantras do, throughout the movie. You will have heard the phrase that with great power comes great responsibility. This mantra is used in a number of other superhero movies. "Madame Web" turns it upside down.
It's interesting when you turn a cliche upside down. Somebody once said that the opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth may, in fact, be another profound truth.
"Madame Web" turns the statement about power and responsibility upside down in an interesting way. The statement becomes "when you accept great responsibility, you attain great power." I'm not sure of the truthfulness of this statement. I think there are many times when you can accept responsibility when the responsibility is not, in fact, yours, and accepting that responsibility is, in fact, a bad thing. So, as I say, I'm not sure of the truthfulness of the "Madame Web" mantra.
But I think it is profound.
And I think that it bears closer examination than the movie gives it. (Movies making profound, or semi-profound, or *seemingly* profound, statements, and then failing to examine them does seem to be a trademark not only of superhero movies in general, but of the Marvel Universe in particular. But we'll leave that for the moment.)
We tend to avoid responsibility. We try very hard to prove that the responsibility, particularly for a problem, belongs to someone else. We make significant efforts to try and prove that someone else has created the problem, and, therefore, the problem is not our responsibility. Avoiding responsibility for a problem seems to be one of the major reasons that we lie so much. We even lie to ourselves to avoid responsibility. We will edit, or modify, or amend our memories so that we remember, truly and deeply, that whatever caused a particular problem was not of our doing; was not our choice. If it was of our doing, we were forced into that action by the actions of someone else. We remember, very clearly, the fact that we were not responsible.
So avoidance of responsibility is a very human trait. And we spend enormous effort, and a great deal of time, in trying to avoid responsibility, and trying to figure out how to pin responsibility on someone else, and to prove that someone else is responsible.
Pretty much all of our legal system is based on this. Oh, yes, there are criminal offences and there are civil lawsuits, but really, almost all of them boil down, in the end, to who is responsible for this act or this crime or this problem. And our system is adversarial, so that one person is responsible, and another person is not. (There are some variations on this. Insurance companies seem to be very good at assessing blame to both sides in an action, in such a way that neither party to the action is actually fully responsible. And therefore the insurance company, who may be ensuring both parties, is not responsible for paying anything.) So responsibility is something we avoid.
Well, what if we stopped avoiding it? What if we accept responsibility? In a sense, that gives us great power. If we are not fighting to prove that we are not responsible, we are not wasting that responsibility-avoiding effort. That means that the effort we are not expending in proving that we are not responsible, can, instead, be directed at solving the problem.
Okay, this isn't a magic power. This isn't a magical provision of extra power. This is just the fact that we can use the power that we have to fix the problem, instead of constantly wasting effort and resources trying to prove that the problem does not belong to us. Even so, it gives us power: it gives us the power to actually fix the problem rather than wasting effort in vain attempts to assert that the problem isn't ours.
This is (one of) the lesson(s) of Dickens' book "Bleak House" where a central theme is the fact that a court case is going on--between two branches of the same family--in regard to an inheritance. By the time the court case is settled, decades and possibly generations after the fact, the inheritance has been entirely consumed by the legal costs of the court case. All of the resources, all of the money and wealth, has been taken up in this avoidance, in a sense, of responsibility. So the effort, the resources, the power have been completely, utterly, and absolutely wasted, and nothing is left of any benefit.
Except, of course, to the legal teams who have worked for all of this time.
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